SupERScientists Animation Short Film

Our animation short, “SuperScientists - Origins”, based on our comic, is done! Check out the trailer above. The film has screened in a number of film festivals this last year and was awarded the 2025 Discovery Award by Rolls-Royce as part of the Goethe-Institut Science Film Festival, the largest science film festival in the world. Out of 15000 films submitted, 123 films from 37 countries were part of the festival and 6, including our film, were awardees!

We are now developing a series with funding from the National Film and Video Foundation. The series will explore different fields of science through the teen characters we’ve created and of course the wonderful Mrs Ples.

Credit for the animation to The Hidden Hand Studios, director Ross Lelliott, with funding by the National Film and Video Foundation for both the short and series development.

Want to bring some SuperScientists into your home? Download and colour-in (for free!) or print most of our materials (also free!).

How it’s made

How does an animation come together?

It starts with the writing. We started with our comic that Justin Yarrow and Clyde Beech created. We took it and some funding to The Hidden Hand Studios and Ross Lelliott, the cofounder of the studio, took it on as director. The comic worked as a comic but needed to be reconsidered for something with more action, tension and humor. Two accomplished writers took on this task, Greig Cameron and Pete O’Donoghue.

From there the storyboard artist, the awesome Adrean Sigogo, made rough sketches of what they wrote. Applying the character art that Lesego Vorster created, Adrean then made the animatic. It’s the bottom half of these videos. As you can see the animatic really defines the look of the final film, everything from the looks of the characters, to the camera angles that are used. From there, with lots of iteration and meetings in between, we have the final piece(above), in this case animated by Tshiamo Kadiege

Here’s another clip by Immanuel Maxie Jr Pirikisi (@sonmadmax on Instagram), for the transformation of scientists into SuperScientists.

Of course there’s more to include - voice artists, music, compositing to give the cool effects. In total about 40 talented and dedicated artists worked on this short film!